Category Archives: vacation jobs

Huge thanks toRibit, CiT, Canberra Uni and ANU for having me present the Xero vacation program at Get Connected Canberra #2. Neha Sood (Grad Developer – Xero) came along with me, and we did some really great micro interviews with Students.

I got to provide a 30 sec brief on Xero and out vacation program for Software Engineers and we then spent around 90 minutes doing mini-interviews

Was a really great night and met a bunch of sensational students interested in coding.

For any students who attended who are interested in learning more about C#/.NET check out lots of articles/links on this site as well as a bunch of other cool websites for .NET learning resources including: http://www.asp.net and http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/

I have the pleasure of working with some university students during a summer vacation program. It’s a great experience and their enthusiasm and drive is seriously impressive. For any current university students here is a great article by an absolute legend of the .net community:

“I’m talking about actually using a source control system to manage code, to review past work, to see the flow of changes, etc.

What about knowing how to debug? I’m talking about a bit more than F5 and F10. I’m talking about practical things like being able to debug a big system and understand how to work the debugger to give you what you want. Knowing how to look at the stack trace, or understand the difference between an exception that is thrown (and handled) and an unhandled exception.

What about actually solving real world problems? Like a project that has a double assembly reference because of a bad merge, and you need to be able to track it down and fix it.

What about actually reading code? Given a non trivial amount of code, figuring out what is going on and making changes there.”

Ayende Rahien, 2015.

Now if you are a student studying software engineering don’t be disheartened. It’s just that you’ve started a journey and one of the things most seasoned developers will say is “there are no shortcuts”